to announce today that the five of us here today, and eight of us in total, including senators mccain, durbin, graham, menendez, rubio, flake and bennett, have come together on a set of bipartisan principles for comprehensive immigration reform legislation that we hope can pass the senate in overwhelming and bipartisan fashion. we still have a long way to go. but this bipartisan group -- sorry, we still have a long way to go, but this bipartisan blueprint is a major breakthrough. it is our hope that these principles can be turned into legislation by march, and have a markup by chairman leahy's committee with the goal of passage out of the senate by late spring or summer. senator durbin and i spoke to the president yesterday to update him on this group's progress, and he couldn't be more pleased. he strongly supports this effort. the key to our compromise is to recognize that americans overwhelmingly oppose illegal immigration and support legal immigration. to this end, our framework contains four basic pillars. first, we create a tough but fair path to citizenship for illegal immigrants curre